We’ve seen so much of the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Delon that it would have been criminal to miss this one. Even those of a certain age who haven’t seen Le Samouraï will certainly be famliar with Delon’s iconic look here with his hat and trenchcoat. It’s a gorgeous, slick film of competence on all sides put on display. The title is pure cultural appropriation however meant only to evoke a particular mood. Similarly the plot is more style than substance and the ending is the usual unsatisfying death, Melville-style. I wouldn’t call this a particularly deep film but it sure is cool.

A man whose name we would later learn is Jef Costello wakes up in a bare, run-down apartment. The only thing of note in it is a cage with a single pet bird in it. He steals a car on the street outside and goes to a mechanic to have its plates changed while also obtaining a gun there. Next he goes to the apartment of a girlfriend Jane to arrange an alibi. Finally at a nightclub he assassinates the owner but is seen clearly by the club’s pianist Valérie as he is leaving the office. Leaving her alive, he completes his alibi by allowing himself to be seen by another man outside Jane’s apartment and then joining a poker game. The police commissioner reacts quickly by having his men round up all of the usual suspects including Jef. The suspects are paraded before the nightclub’s staff and they are asked about their whereabouts. The commissioner has a hunch that Jef is the culprit but his alibis are airtight even after bringing in Jane for questioning. When Valérie rules him out as the assassin, the commissioner is forced to release Jef but continues surveillance on him.

Alain Delon radiates coolness just lying down motionless on a dinky mattress. When he puts on his coat and hat, Melville’s camera perfectly captures his look and Delon runs his fingers along the brim to get it at just the right angle. Even when he is injured and has to bandage himself, he remains impassive and collected. He isn’t omnipotent but he a consummate professional at all times. To match him, the police commissioner has to be similarly experienced and knowledgeable and is able to call on far greater resources to boot. It’s supremely satisfying then to watch them match wits against each other with the streets and metro stations of Paris as their battlefield. This is more of what I like to call competence porn, as beautifully conceived and shot by Melville. He sells the illusion further by framing Jef as the modern day heir of the Japanese samurai, a sort of lone wolf who is both skilled and operates according to his own code of honor.

Yet this is an illusion. Melville invented the opening epigraph, citing a book that doesn’t exist. Real Japanese samurai were nothing like this so the director was just taking advantage of how Japanese culture had captured the public imagination at that time. The cat-and-mouse game between Jef and the commissioner is more the appearance of competence than the real thing. For all the elaborate precautions Jef takes, he never does the one obvious trick of changing out of his clothes. The commissioner’s first move is to call up all of the police stations in Paris to round up suspects. Not only does it work but Jef expects to be among those rounded up despite not having a criminal record. This film is all about the rule of cool and we were never meant to look any deeper. Similarly Jef is a blank slate, an assassin with no past whose mind is closed to us. We know that he is not totally emotionless as his relationship with Jane is real but he remains more of an archetype than a real person.

So for me this is a very stylish and beautiful film, one influential enough that it has been used as a visual reference for countless other works. But it has nothing of substance to say and my own takeaway from it is how cynical it was of Melville to exploit the exoticism of Japan at the time to inject just a bit more coolness to the character.